Unlikely to be available for download anywhere unless someone has dumped it - unfortunately most network boot ROMs were a paid add-on often developed by a third-party company (often LanWorks who was later acquired by 3Com) and not provided by the vendor for free download. Unless you need to use that card specifically it may be easier to go shopping for a card that already has a boot ROM installed (difficult - most cards were sold with an empty ROM socket), or switching to a card that the manufacturer provided free ROM images for (Realtek, AMD, perhaps others).

I've put together a list of the ROMs I'm aware of below but most, if not all, of the free ROMs speak the RPL boot protocol, not PXE - presumably Novell didn't charge royalties for their Boot ROM SDK:
http://www.zx.net.nz/netware/client/rpl_rom.shtml

Apparently iPXE supports the 3C515.
Another alternative is a minimal Etherboot ROM which then chain loads iPXE from a boot server.

Intel included some boot ROMs on some of their cards but they were proprietary for the specific Intel NIC and varied protocols. Have a few Intel with it, but none of the non-Intel ISA do except a few with a Novell boot ROM as mentioned....

I think virtually all boot ROMs will be specific to if not a specific model of NIC a specific family as the ROM needs to include a driver for whatever ethernet chip its working with.

From what I've read the Intel EtherExpress 16 cards have, by default, an old-style IPX ROM that's only capable of booting from a NetWare server or something that looks 100% identical to a NetWare server like Mars NWE - the ROM will include a mini NetWare client that will try to attach to the nearest NetWare server and mount SYS:\LOGIN\NET$DOS.SYS (a floppy disk image with an odd choice of extension) as A: then continue the boot process from there.

There is newer Novell RPL ROM ("Novell NetWare Ready Firmware") for these cards which should also support booting from Windows NT. When booting from a NetWare server these newer Novell RPL ROMs can present a list of disk images to choose from which is kind of neat:

There is also an RPL implementation for Linux and it can apparently be made to work with Mars NWE as well as chain load iPXE from a NetWare RPL boot ROM though I've not tried doing either - I've only pointed RPL ROMs at real NetWare servers so far.

While a bit off topic, if the goal is iPXE then any card with at least a Novell RPL boot ROM will probably do the job.

Thanks for the responses 😀

As most of you have suggested, my intension was to use an RPL BootROM with my 3C515 cards to chainload with iPXE. While iPXE does have support for the 3C515, by default it generates a ROM binary far to big to fit the maximum 32KB EPROM for this card, and so you can only boot the iPXE loader from floppy - which really defeats the purpose 😉 Unfortunately it seems that iPXE - in terms of hardware support - focuses on more modern cards with larger PROM sizes, rather than legacy/retro cards. I have tried recompiling the 3C515 ROM with all the unnecessary functionality removed, but just cant get the binary down to 32KB.

However, the suggestions seem to be going back to the much older of the iPXE project - such as gPXE or RemoteBoot and using those just to generate the BootROM. There apparently used to be a site called http://rom-o-matic.net/ that could automatically generate PXE BootROMs for a given card, but alas no more.

Chris

It seems that source code for rom-o-matic is available on github https://github.com/etherboot/gpxe/tree/master … rib/rom-o-matic You may try to host it locally.
Or compile gPXE images from source: https://github.com/etherboot/gpxe

Depending on what you're trying to network boot, it might be worth giving RPL + Mars NWE (a NetWare emulator for Linux, like samba) a go. If you're booting DOS I assume you're going to want to map a network drive to run other software from once DOS has started. The 16bit NetWare DOS client by default uses well under half the conventional memory the Microsoft SMB client uses and with a few config tweaks you might be able to load the entire thing high. There are ways of using the 32bit client too which saves a lot more but its a bit more complicated.

Just for fun looked up the rom-o-matic on wayback machine....
http://web.archive.org/web/20050604025751/htt … om-o-matic.net/
list of supported NICs: http://web.archive.org/web/20050730013912/www … herboot.org/db/ still works and "Chip: 40-0282, Model: 3Com 3c515 is there.
Most of their stuff is also at https://sourceforge.net/projects/etherboot/files/ as per the bottom of rom-o-matics old pages. Would be cool to resurrect the old website somewhere...